Soy Capitán at Wilhelm Hallen • 10.09.–18.09.2022

For the 2022 edition of the K60 Exhibition at Wilhelm Hallen, we exhibited work by Grace Weaver, Rachel Youn and Klara Hobza.

We featured a new work by painter Grace Weaver, displaying her signature self-examining female subject, a pensive woman with short red hair, bent over a work in progress. Weaver is drawn to depicting the psychological complexity underlying mundane, contemporary life. In her recent paintings, Grace Weaver continues her distinctive imagery of emblematic figures, portraiture and urban scenes and scenarios. Expanding her vocabulary, the new works are painted up close, direct and present. In a similar manner to how she draws with charcoal—marking, rubbing out, and layering to create new arrangements—Weaver exposes previously buried brushstrokes and compositions.

Rachel Youn, a new artist to the gallery, creates lively and provocative kinetic sculptures. We exhibited their Neither Fruit Nor Flower, a sculpture of an artificial plant propelled by a massage machine, a loaded object, meant to simulate care and intimacy, once discarded, now re-purposed. Working across sculpture and installation, Rachel Youn sources materials with a history of aspiration and failure through online secondhand shopping. Venturing into the suburbs, Youn rescues electric massagers from “suburban limbo”, fastening artificial plants to the machines to create kinetic sculptures that are clumsy, erotic, and absurd. Their work identifies with the replica that earnestly desires to be real.

On view was also Klara Hobza’s Animaloculomat, a mixed media, interactive piece. Allowing us to see ourselves through the eyes of bats, jumping spiders, squids, snakes, horses and dragon fish, this photo booth prints photo postcards of the visitors utilizing the vision of these many diverse animals. The work bestows upon the viewer a sense of scientific wonder and delight. Hobza’s practice incorporates performance, video, drawing and sculpture, to present natural matters in playful, humorous ways.

After the pandemic brought about the demise of so many cultural events, the group exhibition K60 was created to highlight the importance of collaboration and support among galleries, to unify and bolster the Berlin art scene. Launched in 2020, we were delighted to participate this year for the third edition, banding together with so many wonderful galleries that make Berlin’s scene particularly strong and special.